Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2016

[engine]

Continuing from:
Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4802991.htm [webmasterworld.com]



Monday was a public holiday in the U.S. and also Europe, and I know that many kids in Europe are off school this week, probably on vacation with the parents.

Depending upon your sector, you may be busy, or quiet.

Have you seen the branding tests in Google SERPs?

Put in a search and add the brand name. The brand name appears at the end of the entry, slightly clipping the title.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:03 pm (utc) on Jun 2, 2016]

[MrSavage]

Not sure where to put this observation. Holy smokes. A couple updated threads a day in the Google SEO forums? Am I missing something? Pulse of webmasters all over the world. Yikes. Consequences of Google updates or is that Captain Obvious speaking?

[Martin Ice Web]

Seeing big drops in traffic on all ecom sites . Quality of remaining traffic is very, very low. No user interaction.

With google traffic going down every day, we see traffic raising from scraping bots. Every day we have to update our htaccess file.
Massive amount of SPAM Mails arrive when google updates are going through.


ecom, germany

[glakes]

Not sure where to put this observation. Holy smokes. A couple updated threads a day in the Google SEO forums? Am I missing something? Pulse of webmasters all over the world. Yikes. Consequences of Google updates or is that Captain Obvious speaking?

My latest visitors from Google consist of people from Sudan, Thailand, UAE, India (manual scrapers probably) and few from the market I sell to. When it comes to ecommerce and small businesses, Google is yesterday's news. Amazon is keeping me busy filling orders.

[samwest]

Is anyone seriously hoping for Google SERPs to ever improve? My own trust rank of them is a negative number. I will never buy another PPC ad or waste time tweaking to please them. Bing still has it right and Amazon is the new buyer channel.

[MrSavage]

Google doesn't view any of my websites as a partnership anymore, so I have little hope for SERPs improvements. I'll take what is offered, but in no way am I investing in anything that relies on their organic traffic. As the expression goes, they don't give a rats A. I like to keep my self respect at this point, whatever is left of it.

[RedBar]

When it comes to ecommerce and small businesses, Google is yesterday's news.

I made a statement something like that 2/3 years ago regarding my global industry turning its back on G since it was so irrelevant. This has also been borne out by my AdSense earnings, I may, just may, reach the minimum this month, I used to be $10+K.

Realword business fine, Google's hope of a cyberworld, finished insofar as my industry is concerned.

[masterjoe]

Traffic has improved by about 20% over the last week or so, but conversions have been abysmal. I noticed that a competitor who tried negative SEO'ing one of my sites (which is now #1 for the result he tried to overoptimize), is now paying for ads on that keyword, which could possibly be interrupting my sales. I will be starting up my adwords campaign again to see if it's still remotely profitable.

[samwest]

Well here's an article that conforms what we suspected 2 years ago...or more. [ahrefs.com...]

[samwest]

masterjoe - let us know how that works out. I'd rather burn money than spend it on Adwords, same thing.

[masterjoe]

Will do. Im also going to teach this idiot a lesson and outrank him for his best keywords to make up for lost time and effort. Even if adwords fails to deliver, I should see a decent increase in organics.

As an aside, Uber has also become a greed machine. I signed up early and made some decent money out of it on the side and then moved onto my own online projects. Pay has been cut in more than half, so I fail to see why people are slaving away right now for pennies on the dollar. I talked to a driver that makes less than minimum wage after expenses and it turns out they also increased their own commission after dropping fares 20% for riders.

What is it with these enormous businesses that get off on taking it out on the little guys?

Anyway, i will keep posting if I see anything decent with adwords or if its still a black hole.

[NickMNS]

@samwest
I love these studies, studies that are carried out by people who have no idea about how to conduct proper research.

The first question to ask is whether the results are statistically significant. The correlation figures in and of themselves are secondary. In other words are the correlation figures reported, due to randomness and noise or can they be explained, within some reasonable probability, by the data. If the value are insignificant who cares what they are, they are just noise. If the values are significant, then you can begin discussing how well and in what direction they correlate.

[ecommerceprofit]

roundtable posted about zombies. Interesting.

[OldFaces]

Saw that. John M. finally is referring to this traffic as zombies as well - way to go webmasterworld! :)

[samwest]

@eprofit - glad to see they are finally taking this seriously...or maybe just deflecting. After all these years there is still so much wrong on Google. Just this morning I entered in one of my main key phrases and while a subpage appropriate for that phrase appears, google image results are still way out of whack. The second image is a 10+ year old CAD rendering image from my site that is being hosted on a scaper site and when you click it, it redirects to <widgets site>, the ubiquitous click bank affiliate. It's heartbreaking. I also posted this issue to Google WMC. It's these kinds of results that are pulling down the rest of my site. So, Google's inaccuracy is the likely cause and I've been paying for it since 2010.

@NickMNS - what specifically are you referring to? Your post reads somewhat like Lorem Ipsum.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:44 pm (utc) on Jun 23, 2016]
[edit reason] Wigetised [/edit]

[NickMNS]

@samwest
I am referring to your ahrefs link. The study goes on in length discussing correlation without ever mentioning whether or not the correlation figures are statistically significant. Take any two things and you can calculate a correlation. I can calculate a correlation between the color of your shirt vs my earnings in Adsense. The correlation figure calculated will most likely not be statistically significant, in other words I am just measuring noise.

[seohhh]

@samwest I've been seeing lots of backlinks in my profile that redirect to <brand name>. They are always scraper sites that just cycle through but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the originating domains. I haven't experienced any scraped images that redirect but I'll be on the lookout now. (long-time lurker, first time poster)

[edited by: aakk9999 at 12:03 pm (utc) on Jun 23, 2016]
[edit reason] Removed brand name [/edit]

[robzilla]

I'm confused how in 2016 a parked EMD (used to be a popular site, many backlinks) can rank top 5 for a competitive single-word query. Are backlinks still that big a signal, one that trumps having zero content? I can't imagine a parked domain sends out any other positive signals.

[toidi]

Are backlinks still that big a signal, one that trumps having zero content?

i have a handful of sites with no content, just a bunch of pages with iframes that show up on page one for very competitive local phrases. Even if g is reading the iframes, they don't have anything in them that is not on hundreds of other sites, including another of my own very optimized content rich site.

G is broken and instead of trying to fix it they are milking it like most typical vc ventures do.

[Wijnand schouten]

G is not broken, their earnings are still sky high, so from their perspective the changes they made, whatever they are, work out well.

Google does not work in your favour, and will not do so in near future. When you expect this, you should think again.

[Kelowna]

Not sure where to put this observation. Holy smokes. A couple updated threads a day in the Google SEO forums? Am I missing something? Pulse of webmasters all over the world. Yikes. Consequences of Google updates or is that Captain Obvious speaking?

The real seo's that know how to rank have all but left, there are a few still lurking around waiting for the "good old days" to hopefully return so the discussion can get back to better rankings. Until then 80% of the talk on here is just winers talking about zombies and how they don't know how to get their sites to rank, or google is broken, that sort of BS. Gets kinda tiring real quick if that is all you see in the so-called update thread.

Are backlinks still that big a signal, one that trumps having zero content?

Yes with google it is still just the links, do not fall for that bs about content is king, it has always been about the links.

[Atomic]

No one else is saying anything, but I'll just throw this out there: is anyone noticing anything like an update today?

My traffic and conversions are both seeing a big increase this morning.

[MrSavage]

@Kelowna, my observation was not specific to this thread, but more as a whole of this Google SEO forum. It's clearly indicative of the pulse of the webmastering community. If there was optimism/hope or anything "non futile" regarding rankings, we would not see a handful or less of new updated thread/posts per day. It's astonishing quite frankly.

[ionguy]

@Atomic
good to hear that some of us see improvements
for me all day is dead and i mean totally dead. kw up but traffic and conversions (actually 0.0 until now which is really strange) down.
seasonal? not! the worse june since 10 years

[pshea]

@Atomic <<is anyone noticing anything like an update today?>> Yes. Northeast USA. Completely new results were live for a few hours, now returned to old serps. New results flirted with live about a month ago as well. Newsworthy to me -- old serps have been static for about 2 years, so this would be the first change in that long.

[nomis5]

Are backlinks still that big a signal, one that trumps having zero content?

It depends which niche you are in. In some niches which are massively popular, backlinks are not that big. A couple of my websites are proof of that.

Let's just put some hard stats to that statement rather than just opinion with no backup facts.

My niche is a massively popular hobby worldwide, especially the western world. The top UK site in that niche currently ranks 19,000 in Alexa. Whatever you think about Alexa, at that sort of level it does give a reasonable idea that the site is hugely popular.

I outrank several pages on that site with my pages that have no or very few external backlinks

The terms I refer to are popular within that niche, not just obscure ones. Let's put it like this, if the sites were about cars, my page about the Ford Focus outranks the Alexa 19,000 one.

I've been around the block for 20 years or so in this business and I'm not fooled by personalisation or other factors. Several of my pages with no backlinks outrank equivalent pages with 100s of backlinks.

[Atomic]

@pshea - The SERPs I track here in the NW USA did not change all that much. I saw conversions coming in from more pages than I usually see. It seems that whatever was happening affected many SERPs.

[mrengine]

Is there an update going on? I'm getting all kinds of foreign traffic from Google including places like Azerbaijan, Philippines and other places (some I've never seen before). What is missing are USA visitors from Google and that's where our business is located at and sells to on our ecommerce site.

[samwest]

@ecom and @faces - that seo square table site talk about John M. seems to be bunk. and here I thought advice on WebmasterWorld was bad...except for a few, they are worse by a long shot.

[Simon_H]

@samwest People may criticise WebmasterWorld's forum rules for being too restrictive, but at least it doesn't attract the self-righteous unhelpful arse hats that certain other sites do.

[ecommerceprofit]

I agree. I made sure to stick to that thread like glue so I could debunk all of their attacks. Sort of a waste of time but these guys constantly attack with offhanded dismissive remarks that were "subtle" It was nice to have other zombie victims on there fighting back too. For some reason these other posters have an agenda. Why would they spend all of this time trying to attack when they could be doing something more productive? My guess is just plain ego.

It's nice to see Simon trying to analyze this on his own. Getting actual data for John to analyze and now John has plenty of data to compare to Simon's site. Hopefully other webmasters will now see this phenomena on their own sites (where they did not understand this before) and start to report on other seo blogs / sites. This just needs a little attention so the powers at be at Google will take a look.

Is Google good or evil is now the question. If they are good they will give us guidance...not just a story they hope we will believe. Hopefully they will just fix the problem (working with the VP of adwords...or whatever you call it). Adwords not working isn't acceptable.